For The Time Being:
new images, thoughts, observations and a bit of this and that

Monday, January 8, 2018

Jeanne Heifetz Answers:

Thank you to Jeanne for answering some of my questions. I love the materiality and mapping quality of this new work.

Pre-Occupied 66

graphite
on flax paper tinted with iron oxide
21″ x 29″2017

Pre-Occupied 76

graphite on flax paper sized with persimmon juice 29″ x 21″

2017

Pre-Occupied 18 silver graphite on flax paper tinted with iron oxide

21″ x 29″

2016

Pre-Occupied 12

silver graphite on Indian sunn hemp paper

13″ x 17″

2016

What inspires you?

The series I’ve been working on for the past two years,
“Pre-Occupied,” was inspired by Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Guggenheim
in 2015. Up to that point my work had been very process-based, but Salcedo made
me wonder whether artists have an obligation to make work about things that frighten
us.

Pre-Occupied
statement:

In
this series, I challenged myself to confront something that terrifies me.

I
have had death panics since I was eight years old. Ironically, the only real
estate I am ever likely to own is a parcel of eight cemetery plots I inherited
from my grandfather. The deed to the plots came with a map of the cemetery,
which seemed like the logical place to begin to address my fear. Each drawing
in this series is based on the map of a different Jewish cemetery, including
the ones where my own relatives are buried. (I am not religious, but the
historical and familial connection was important: these are all places I could be buried, even though I remain
completely unreconciled to the idea of my own death.)

I
can’t claim that drawing the maps allays my panic. Death remains entirely
unknowable terrain: the map can never be the territory. And yet, stripped of
identifying text, the cemeteries’ abstract forms are mysteriously compelling,
grounding me in the universal human drive to create beauty, order, and ritual
in the face of our own mortality.

I don’t think of my work as political, as Salcedo’s clearly
is. Yet after the 2016 election, as my husband and I started pulling together
our passport applications, I began thinking about what it means to flee a
country and leave your dead behind, exposed and vulnerable. In Europe during
and after the war, Jewish headstones were pulled up and used as the foundations
of houses or as flagstones in patios and roadways. I also started thinking
about the way we can carry our dead with us, and the way the remnants of the destroyed
shtetls of Eastern Europe can be found
in American cemeteries: you can trace our ancestral villages in the names of
the burial societies. So while many of us have been asking ourselves how to
respond to the current political moment in our work, I found my work connected
to that moment in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

What is your personal history?

I grew up in an apartment on the Upper West Side of New York
City and considered the Met my playground. I knew the layout of the museum by
heart. I loved the children’s wing with the diorama of the medieval workshop,
the interactive color wheel, and the film of how egg tempera is made (the
current version of the children’s wing is completely sterile by comparison). I
still have the tiny books I got there as a child: How to Look at Paintings and How
to Look at Sculpture. But I never imagined myself becoming an artist. My
high school’s art program was pretty tepid: I could swear we drew the same
still life every year. I can still close my eyes and see that spider plant. But
something else happened in those years. Our school librarian was also a dance
critic, and she taught an afterschool class in dance appreciation. I got
hooked. In that era, you could get tickets to New York City Ballet for $4 or $5
(in the highest tier of the theatre – but if you spotted an empty seat below
you could claim it during the intermission). I did that about three times a
week, and I think my education in pattern and structure and visual rhythm as
well as my interest in light and shadow and playing with translucency and scrims
came from watching Balanchine ballets (not to mention Karinska’s costumes and
Jennifer Tipton’s lighting). I never had any formal art training. I have two
degrees in English, and a background in weaving, which I learned in a summer
course at 14 and did professionally for years. Eventually I moved from making
functional work on the loom to making sculptural work using textile techniques
with non-traditional materials (wire and glass) to drawing on stone with
powdered metals mixed with cold wax, to drawing on paper.

20” x 20”

2009

My parents met at the High School of Music & Art, but
both of them were musicians. My mother worked in cultural and educational
exchange for the State Department, but she also took classes at the Art
Students’ League. Her grandfather had been a goldsmith who made beautiful Art
Nouveau jewelry with a lot of delicate filigree and repoussé work. I guess if
there’s a gene for doing detailed work on a tiny scale I inherited it from him.
My mother’s best friend from high school was the Israeli painter Nora Frenkel,
whose work filled the apartment I grew up in. My father was passionate about
photography, and taught it out of our apartment. We had a darkroom at home
where he (and later I) developed both color and black-and-white film and
prints.

That’s a tough one. I keep a spreadsheet of artists whose
work I admire (and share on Facebook) and it’s got almost 900 names on it. But
I also have keywords on the spreadsheet to help me remember each artist’s work,
and some of the most frequent keywords are “obsessive,” “cellular,”
“biomorphic,” “mapping,” “accretion,” “layering,” and “installation.” So that
gives you an idea of what floats my boat.

In the studio

About Me

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